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The Germanic Third Weak Class THE GERMANIC THIRD WEAK CLASS JAY H. JASANOFF Harvard University Germanic verbs of the 3rd weak class form presents characterized by an alternation between predesinential *ai (e.g. Go. 3sg. habai1» and *a (e.g. Ipl. habam). These verbs are usually compared with the 'e-verbs' of Italic and Balto­ Slavic, but no IE present built on the stative suffix *-e- will account phonologi­ cally for the form of the suffix in Germanic. Instead, it can be shown that the characteristic Germanic paradigm results from the 'activization' of an older middle paradigm in which a 3sg. in *-ai « IE *-oi; cf. Skt. duh~ 'milks') was further suffixed by the productive active ending *-Pi « IE *-ti). 1. The inflection of the third class of weak verbs (exemplified by the verb 'to have': Gothic haban, Old Norse hafa,! Old High German hab~, Old Saxon hebbian, Old English habban) presents one of the classic problems in the historical morphology of Germanic. Not only do the verbs of this class show peculiarities in all the older Germanic languages, but they differ remarkably in their conjugation from one language to another, so that it is not at all obvious how the Common Germanic paradigm should be reconstructed. Given this diversity of forms, we will do well to begin with a short review of the morphological facts themselves. The situation is simplest in Old High German. The entire conjugation of hab~n is athematic (to the extent that this term still has any meaning), and is based on the single stem hab~-: 1sg. hab~, 3sg. hab~t, 3pl. hab~t, impv. 2sg. habe, opt. 3sg. habe, hab2e, prete 1sg. hab~ta, pres. pte. hab~ti, past pte. gihab2t. Except for the e of the stem, this paradigm is completely parallel to that of a 2nd class weak verb like 8alb~ 'anoint' (lsg. salbOm, 3sg. salb,jt, like habhn, hab~t etc.) The resemblance between the two classes extends to at least one set of forms which cannot be old. These are the longer optatives 3sg. hab2e, salb,je, 2sg. hab22s, salb62s etc., which seem to have been created analogically. The genesis of this formation, which will not concern us further in this paper, is discussed by Cowgill (1959: 11-12). The OHG pattern is not found in any other Germanic language. In Gothic the corresponding verb haban exhibits a systematic opposition between stem forms habai- (phonetically probably [habE· -]) and haba-. To the habai- group belong 2sg. habais, 3sg. habaijJ, 2pl. habaijJ, the corresponding imperatives (2sg. habai etc.), the weak preterit 1-3sg. habaida etc., and the past pte. habaijJs. The rest of the paradigm is indistinguishable from that of a normal strong verb: 1sg. haba, Ipl. habam, 3pl. haband (with impv. 3pl. habandau), opt. lsg. habau, 3sg. habai, passive 1-3sg. habada etc., pres. pte. habands. The Gothic alternation of stems hahai- and haba- is not completely isolated. It recurs almost exactly in Old Norse, where a typical 3rd class weak verb, vaka 'wake', is conjugated in the pres. 1 Here and below, 'Old Norse' will be understood to mean'Old Icelandic' unless other­ wise specified. This paper has benefited greatlyfrom extended discussions with Calvert Watkins, Warren Cowgill, Patrick Hollifield, and F. Roger Higgins. Needless to say, responsibility for errors is entirely my own. 850 THE GERMANIC THIRD WEAK CLASS 851 indic. as lsg. vaki, 2-3sg. vakir, Ipl. vQkum, 2pI. vaki'O, 3pl. vaka. Except for lag. vaki, each term is directly equatable with its Gothic counterpart; and vaki itself is almost certainly an analogical form, created to conform to the otherwise regular pattern lsg. = 3sg. minus -r (cf. 3sg. grefr 'digs', 1sg. gref; 3sg. heyrir 'hears', lsg. heyri). In the other moods and tenses the picture is the same, Old Norse in general showing forms in -i- < older *-e- < *-ai- where Gothic has -ai- (e.g. impv. sg. vaki, syncopated prete vakoa), and forms in -a- where Gothic has ·a- (e.g. info vaka, pres. ptc. vakandi). This inflection is documented in North Germanic from the 7th century; cf. the archaic runic compound wita(n)daha­ laiban 'protector of the bread', semantically parallel to OE hlajord 'bread-guard, lord'. (For ON hafa, segja 'say', and jJegja 'be silent', see §3 below). The greatest complexity is found in Old Saxon and Old English. In both lan­ guages, the 3rd weak class is a mere vestige of a category, the great majority of originally 3rd class verbs having been absorbed into the productive 2nd, or o-class. Old Saxon has carried this development to an extreme, and only two verbs, hebbian 'have' and seggian 'say', are usually considered to represent the unmixed type.2 Their inflection is characterized by an alternation between a stem in -e­ (or -a-), from older *-e- < *-ai-, and a stem in -ja-. The forms in -e- correspond in distribution to the -ai- forms of Gothic (e.g. 2sg. hobes, habas, 3sg. habed, habad) with the significant exception of the short preterit l-3sg. habda and the matching ptc. gihabd, which have the appearance of archaisms. The remaining forms, cor­ responding to those with the simple thematic vowel in Gothic, show general agreement with the 1st weak class: 1sg. hebbiu, pI. hebbiad, opt. 1sg. hebbie, pres. pte. *hebbiandi (cf. libbiandi 'living'), info hebbian; to these must be added the umlauted forms hahbiu, hahbiad etc., which occur with considerable frequency in the Monacensis manuscript of the Heliand. The situation is very similar in Old English. Habban, secgan 'say', and one or two others follow a paradigm essen­ tially identical to that of Old Saxon; the relevant West Saxon forms of habban (the absence of umlaut is no doubt secondary) are lsg. luebbe, 2sg. hcEjst, 3sg. "heefp, pI. habbap, opt. 1sg. hEebbe, pres. ptc. luebbende, info habban, prete l-3sg. ha3jde, past ptc. (3e-)ha3jd. In a number of other verbs, however, Old English has introduced a regularized paradigm (type Anglian lif3an 'live', 1sg. lijJe) which has no counterpart in Old Saxon. This type appears to have been created analogically on thebasis of the inherited 2sg. and 3sg. forms with *e stem vocalism (earlier *ai). It is itself subject to replacement by the productive 2nd class (cl. Cowgill 1959: 13-14). Although it displays an extraordinary degree of paradigmatic diversity in the older Germanic languages, the 3rd class is not a late category. Its archaic charac­ ter can be seen from the fact that a significant number of 3rd class verbs corre­ spond outside Germanic to formations built on a late IE deverbative suffix *-e-: typical examples are OHG dagen 'be silent', Lat. tacere; Go. witan 'watch', Lat. videre 'see', OCS videti, Lith. pavydeti 'envy' (both < *'ljide-, with the Balto­ Slavic lengthened zero-grade discussed by Kurylowicz 1956:291-3); OHG dolht 'suffer', Lith. tyleti 'be silent'; OHG haben, Lat. habere (from parallel roots J OS libbian 'live' already represents a significant departure from the pattern of hebbian and seggian. I t is discussed in §4, below. 852 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 49, NUMBER 4 (1973) *kap- and *ghabh-). This suffix, in which a 'stative' value is usually clearly recognizable, has enjoyed considerable productivity in a central group of IE languages comprising Germanic, Italic, Balto-Slavic, and Greek. It is very prob­ ably related to a homonymous suffix *-e-, equally well-established in IE but somewhat less prominent in Germanic, which serves to derive stative and in­ choative verbs from nouns and adjectives. Denominative 3rd class verbs are synchronically important only in OHG, but their IE pedigree is assured by the important word equation OHG rothl, 'turn red', Lith. rudeti 'rust', Russian Church Slavic r1Jdeti s~ 'blush', OIr ·ruidi 'blush', Lat. rubere 'be red', all pre­ supposing a verbal stem *rudh-e- < adj. *rudh-ro- (cf. Watkins 1972). It is hardly surprising that scholars have been virtually unanimous in connecting both Germanic types with the 'e-verbs' of other IE traditions. But while the fact of the relationship has been universally admitted, there has been very little agreement on how the morphological details of the Germanic situation are to be explained. Accordingly, it will not be amiss to survey a few of the IE and Pre-Germanic formations most commonly assumed to have played a role in the prehistory of the 3rd class. ATHEMATIC PRESENTS IN *-e-. The OHG inflection hab~, -~s, -~t etc. suggests the possibility of an inherited athematic present in *-e-mi, *-e-si, *-e-ti. Such a formation is actually found in Hittite verbs of the denominative type (e.g. dannattet 'became empty', dannattas 'empty'; cf. Watkins 1972) and may lie at the root of a Lat. 3pl. like lucent 'shine' < *-enti if this is not simply analogical. But while perfectly acceptable from an IE standpoint, the hypothesis of an athematic e-conjugation is not easy to reconcile with the Germanic forms. The view that OHG hab~t continues a Common Germanic *habejJ(i)3 has most re­ cently been argued, and with considerable resQurcefulness, by Polome (1967:83­ 92), who is quite correct in noting that there are no insurmountable obstacles to his theory as far as West Germanic is concerned. On the other hand, his iden­ tification of *habejJ(i) as the source of Go. habaijJ seems wrong, and leaves the simple thematic forms haba, habam, haband unexplained.4 Perhaps the most telling objection to his view is the state of affairs in Old Saxon: Why, if Old Saxon in­ herited 1sg. *haben < *-em, did it replace this form by the wholly irregular hebbiu while retaining-jf not actually creating-the parallel 1sg. salbon in the second class? It seems more likely that 1sg.
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